From artificial sweeteners to deodorant, there's a lot of speculation on what causes cancer. But a new study says it's actually the combination of seemingly harmless products that you need to be worried about, rather than individual items.

Theresearch– conducted by a task force of 174
leading scientists in 28 countries and published in the journal
Carcinogenesis – found that chemicals deemed safe to humans could
be blending together to create a lethal combination in the body,
leading to cancer.

Those chemicals are “common and unavoidable,” as they
are found in everyday items around the house – including
cosmetics, textiles, food, and paints.

The named substances include titanium dioxide nanoparticles,
found in sunscreen and food coloring; acrylamide, found in fried
potatoes, triclosan, found in anti-bacterial handwash; and
phthalates, found in plastics. Copper, mercury, and lead were
also named.

“This research backs up the idea that chemicals not
considered harmful by themselves are combining and accumulating
in our bodies to trigger cancer,” said contributing
scientist Dr. Hemad Yasaei, a cancer biologist at Brunel
University in London.

Previous cancer research
has only tested individual substances on their own – a method
that lead author William Goodson III, a senior scientist at the
California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, says is
“quite out of date.”

"Since so many chemicals that are unavoidable in the
environment can produce low-dose effects that are directly
related to carcinogenesis, the way we've been testing chemicals,
one at a time, is really quite out of date," Goodson said in
a statement.

“Every day we are exposed to an environmental ‘chemical
soup’, so we need testing that evaluates the effects of our
ongoing exposure to these chemical mixtures,” he added.

The task force has called for increased emphasis and support for
research on low-dose exposures to environmental chemicals.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of
the World Health Organization (WHO), has evaluated the
cancer-causing potential of more than 900 potential carcinogens
over the past 30 years.

It has classified them into five different categories –
“carcinogenic to humans,” “possibly carcinogenic to humans,”
“probably carcinogenic to humans,” “unclassifiable,” and
“probably not carcinogenic.” A little over 100 have been
deemed “carcinogenic to humans.”